How can a conservative Chris Christie and a very liberal Cory Booker both be comfortably cruising to victory by a large margin in the same electorate in New Jersey? Does this show the power of charisma and that the public largely doesn’t care about policy as much as leaders that they trust and feel are accountable? Or does this simply show the power of independents who break largely for Christie and Booker?

“I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom,” he said in a speech then. “No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists.”

If the executive branch is so vast that President Obama can’t be expected to know about all of these scandals, there’s an even bigger issue at stake here. The government is too big to be managed by the systems that we have in place. This transcends institutional incompetence and gets into a grand old American battle about the size of government, and in the wake of all of these scandals, it seems that big government’s advocates are the best case against it.